Patient Safety

After many years of safety consulting with organizations of all kinds, including those in health and medical care, I’m struck by the division in healthcare between ‘patient safety’ and ‘worker safety’. In most healthcare organizations these two types of safety have separate staffing, metrics, prevention initiatives and systems, and overall leadership emphasis. I believe this division grew naturally for reasons that made sense along the way, but for many organizations it is now time to re-examine the issue. Much is to be gained by integrating these kinds of safety and having them share resources and methods. Doing that effectively requires...

You've see the astounding numbers: hundreds of thousands of Americans die each year due to medical treatment errors. Indeed, the median credible estimate is 350,000, more than U.S. combat deaths in all of World War II. If you measure the “value of life” the way economists and federal agencies do it – that is, by observing how much individuals voluntarily pay in daily life to reduce the risk of accidental death – those 350,000 lives represent a loss exceeding $3 trillion, or one-sixth of GDP. But when decades pass and little seems to change, even these figures lose their power...